DEEP LEARNING

I have broken the model into two main concepts, Old School and New School. There is a tendency within the critical literature around MLP to really overplay the hand of this new age, as if the ubiquitous technology of the current age has fundamentally shifted the way that learning is achieved for learners. This may be true, especially in a classroom of 1:1 devices. But what happens in the classroom of 1:6? Where school leaders are not that committed towards the goals of "deep learning" or "modern learning pedagogies"? Where leaders are pushing for instead "accelerated progress" or some other structural agenda? 

In the old pedagogies, the quality of a teacher’s could be quantified  in terms of their ability to deliver content in their area. The mantle of the expert, the korowai cloak. I remember teachers striding into the classroom and demanding. This model requires at least at some levels, a degree of content knowledge and pedagogical skills to keep the class engaged in their learning. The end goal is mastery. Tech use, of course, is not a key focus but a subsidiary aspect of learning in the classroom. In my education I recall computer labs, where a Computer Studies teacher would give textbooks, provide typing skills instruction and the technology was used for a specific goal of mastering the new knowledge. Or where the OHP was dragged in, or the VHS player and the teacher would control the learning, hopefully some powerful lesson about Dawson or something.

In the new pedagogies, ideally the ubiquitous technology facilitates deep learning as it is embedded in all aspects of learning. Learning is facilitated by the teacher's pedagogical capacity to create partnerships with students. In this model, both student and teacher follow the Vygotskian idyll and discover and master new knowledge together. Where some of the basic facts skills come in I guess in this model get pushed to the side, where students can at some point develop these understandings, or such key learning principles are less important as the technology is so ubiquitous as to create a possibility of students being able to quickly overcome issues such as lack of clarity around vocabulary used in a text or the answer to 7x8. Furthermore these learning tasks are in the content knowledge framework presumably and not in the bold world of New School.

But for my learners in 2016, we are still facing the institutional issues of a) my fears around pushing them too far in this direction when they won't really get to utilise the skills in their following years in more mainstream education b) lack of a workable policy around digital citizenship c) student's engagement in digital learning, which is sometimes limited to logging into drive and typing in as if they are on a typewriter in the 60s. Not that I am trying to encourage a deficit model in my thinking on this issue, as fundamentally what children are capable of doing in the classroom has changed. I like this quote by Will Richardson, “simply adding a layer of expensive tools on top of the traditional curriculum does nothing to address the learning needs of modern learners.” The question that remains with me is what can we do as educators to build our pedagogical capacity for these modern learners in our akomanga?


For more reading, this is highly recommended
Fullan, M. & Langworthy, M. (2014) A Rich Seam: How New Pedagogies Find Deep Learning, London: Pearson, 2014